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Isentia - Tips for success: Make a robot your partner in crime in 2018

Research First - Stop fooling yourself!

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Isentia

Tips for success: Make a robot your partner in crime in 2018

If your New Year’s resolution is to get ahead
of the tech curve, you’re in luck.

As artificial intelligence (AI) transitions
from novel to normalised in 2018, there
are many ways you can integrate advanced technology into your day-to-day life,
making you more productive at work and at home. Andrea Walsh, one of
Australia’s most successful CIO’s, shares tips on how everyone can use machine
learning to squeeze more out of the day.

Decision making

You may not trust a computer to make
important decisions for you, but it can help guide your choices. Committed to read more in 2018? Amazon will analyse your previous purchasing behaviour to recommend books you might like. If
you’d simply like to reconnect with old friends or spend more time with new
ones, Facebook will flag friend suggestions for you. If you’re in the market
for a new job this year, let LinkedIn’s algorithms suggest jobs you may be
interested in or people you should be networking with. Embrace these tools to
help cut through the noise and then use your own insight to make decisions on a
narrowed, personalised field.

Be more punctual

If you are perennially late and have vowed to be
more punctual in 2018, Google Maps is your new best friend, helping you avoid
time-sucking activities like getting lost in parking lots or being caught in
heavy traffic. Using data from your smartphone, Google is able to provide you
with directions to where you parked your car. On the road, Google will analyse your position together with anonymised data from other smartphones to
suggest the fastest route to your destination. If driving full-stop is your
peeve, then you will be pleased to hear that California authorities will allow
self-driving cars to be tested alongside cars driven by humans on roads this
year. Experts predict this could result in a 90% reduction in accidents (which
will arouse all sorts of ethical debates as to whether humans will still be
able to drive cars), 75% less cars on the
road and reduce the work commute by almost half.

Boost creativity

With the rise of machine learning comes the
fear of job losses. “The development of full artificial intelligence could
spell the end of the human race,” Stephen Hawking told the BBC.

An Oxford University survey suggested that 47
per cent of the world’s jobs could be
replaced within decades. Autonomous cars present one example of how jobs in
transport and logistics may be replaced by robots. With this uncertainty comes
the understanding that routine work is far more likely to be automated than
jobs requiring skills like creativity or emotional intelligence. Machines may
be adept at processing large volumes of data, but they can’t make insightful or
creative decisions. The good news is that as machines become smarter, humans
are freed from mundane tasks and can become more creative. If you’re in a small
business, using accounting products like Xero to manage your financial
reporting. This allows you to turn your attention to business boosters like problem solving, improving customer service or
creating new products. If you’re in big business, tools like Amazon Transcribe
or Amazon Translate can perform laborious tasks like producing and translating
documents with lightning speed and accuracy, allowing you to focus on big picture thinking like strategy and
profitability.

Stay on top of current affairs

In my work at Isentia,
we use machine learning to process seven million news items each day. Not long
ago this was a task relegated to humans with the mind-numbing task of flipping
through newspapers in search of stories that might relate to a client. Machines
trawl video, audio and digital content
across more than 5,500 new sites at a rate of 234 stories per second and
present meaningful summaries to clients in real-time. Whether a story breaks on
Twitter and then spills across news platforms and onto television and radio,
machine learning can track and analyse
how a story evolves with 99% accuracy. Use these tools to stay on top of the
issues or people relevant to your industry – in real time.

Make your mark in 2018

The robots aren’t ‘coming’, they are well and
truly here. Without realising, we
interact with ‘smart’ technology at almost every touch point of our daily
lives. As a technologist, I am excited by machine learning not only because I
see its profit boosting value, but also
for how much it can improve our working lives each and every day.

If you learn one thing this year, take the
time to discover how AI can help you be a more creative and productive version
of you in 2018.

Research
First

Stop fooling yourself!

Carl Davidson, Research First

One of my favourite
quotes comes from the great physicist Richard Feynman, who cautioned his
colleagues:

The first principle is that you must not fool
yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Feynman was talking to other scientists about
the practice of science, but his caution is just as relevant for communication
practitioners. To understand why,
consider the case of Donald Trump.

If you’re middle class and educated, you
might still be struggling to understand how Trump became President. Or, like
many of my own friends, you might still be enthralled by the daily updates of
the fear and loathing coming out of the White House, eagerly anticipating the
train wreck that is surely imminent.

But the more I think about this, the more I
think about what Feynman said. And the surer I am that there is a larger lesson
to be learned here.

Let’s start with the grim facts: According to
the Pew Research Center, most of those people who voted for Trump in 2016 would
likely vote for him again. As a result, Pew is convinced that, if the election
was held again tomorrow, Trump would win again.

Before I go on, pause for a moment and
consider your reaction to that.

Because here’s the important part of what I’m
going to say: that reaction provides a powerful insight into how we are all
wired to fool ourselves.

The good news is that, at some level, this is
not really our fault. Evolution has wired all of us to be ‘cognitive misers’.
That is, we all think about as little as we can get away with. This makes more
sense when you realise that while our
brains take up about 2% of our body weight, they burn at least 20% of the fuel
that goes into our bodies. As a result, our brains take shortcuts wherever and
whenever they can. In a very real way, our brains prefer processing fluency
over accuracy.

As a result, mostly what we do when we
believe we’re ‘thinking’ about the world is applying the same old well-worn
‘heuristics and biases’. It feels like
we’re thinking but we’re mostly going through the motions. This is because
those biases and heuristics are things we think with but only rarely about.

I think we need to spend more time in 2018
thinking about them. Now, there are too many biases to discuss here (you can
read a fuller list at:
http://researchfirst.co.nz/wordpress/wp-content/u...
but I want to briefly outline three of the big ones. In the process, I want to
show you why none of us is really as smart as we think we are.

Now you might think all of this explains
what’s wrong with Trump and the confederacy of dunces he’s gathered around him
but I’m actually talking about you. And me. And everyone who works in
professional communications.

The first of the biases we need to confront,
and one of those most powerful shortcuts our brains uses to make sense of the world, is called confirmation bias.
'Confirmation bias' is, in David McRaney's words:

A filter through which you see a reality that
matches your expectations.

In other words, it's the tendency to look for
confirmation of our pre-existing ideas
while ignoring any evidence that might disprove those ideas.

The evidence suggests we process confirming
ideas about twice as fast as disconfirming ones. As a result, one of the most
common reasons we all make mistakes is not because the right answers are too
hard but because the wrong answers are too easy.

There isn’t room here to demonstrate this
bias to you, but try this simple question: when did you last change your mind
about anything really important?

One of the reasons it’s hard to spot
ourselves using confirmation bias is because our brains tidy away our mistakes.
The second of the biases I want to talk about here, ‘hindsight bias’, is a
common way we do that.

Hindsight bias, also known as ‘I
knew-it-all-along effect’, is the inclination, after an event has occurred, to
see the event as having been predictable. We do this all the time, despite
failing to predict those events beforehand. Think of this bias as a way of
editing your memory to fit the current situation. This is a particularly
pernicious bias because it leads us to genuinely believe we knew the outcome
all along, even though we didn’t.

Where hindsight bias is not enough to expunge
error, your brain fails to record your own mistakes thanks to the third bias I
want to talk about. This is known as ‘the fundamental attribution error’, and occurs where
we see our own failings as being caused by external factors beyond our control
while seeing the failings of others as a reflection of their character. In
other words, when we make mistakes, we always have a good reason (we were
tired, rushed, not really thinking) but when other people do the same thing,
it’s because there is something wrong with them. Tell me again about how you
feel about the proposition Trump voters would re-elect him tomorrow?

I said I’d talk about three biases but
there’s a fourth that goes hand in hand with these three. If you’re like most
people, then you probably don’t think you’re like most people. As a result, you
might be able to appreciate these biases intellectually,
and to spot them in others. But it’s unlikely that you think they apply to you.

Well guess what, that itself is a bias. It’s known as the Bias Blind
Spot Bias. This occurs when we can recognise
the impact of biases on the judgment of
others but fail to see the impact of those biases on our judgment. The fact that we are often
cognitively blind is no surprise, but the extent to which we can be blind to
our own blindness should be.

This is why Feynman’s caution is so powerful and
so important. For all of us, our ability to make sense of the world rests on
what Daniel Kahneman called “an almost unlimited ability to ignore our
ignorance”. My challenge to you for 2018
is to work hard to notice and arrest that impulse. As that old adage put it:
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me

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